Дуглас Кеннеди - Five Days

I reached out and touched his arm.

‘Thank you for telling me that.’

He covered my hand with his.

‘It’s me who should be thanking you.’

‘It’s also me who should be thanking you.’

‘For what?’

‘For getting me to let down my guard for a change. It’s something everyone at work always says about me. I am perfectly professional and pleasant, but completely guarded. Dan has often told me the same thing — I have this taciturn side.’

‘That’s news to me,’ he said, his hand still covering mine.

‘You don’t know me yet.’

‘You can know a great deal about someone in just a few hours.’

‘Just like I now know that you are going to buy this apartment.’

Richard glanced back up at the top of the brownstone, his hand leaving mine. And in a voice just a decibel or so above a whisper he said:

‘I hope that’s the outcome.’

Why shouldn’t it be? I wanted to ask him. But instead I held back, simply saying:

‘I hope so too.’

Richard’s gaze returned to me.

‘So. any thoughts about what we should do now? If, that is, you want to. ’

‘. continue the afternoon? No, I want to flee the elegance of Commonwealth Avenue to return to that God-awful hotel and attend the five p.m. conference on advanced colonoscopy techniques. not that I do colonoscopies.’

‘But it sounds so romantic.’

I laughed. Then said:

‘If you’re agreeable, what I’d like to find now is a museum or art gallery, because that’s something I can’t walk to back home. And I’d prefer something I’m not going to see in Maine. Heard of the ICA?’

‘That new place on the harbor front?’

‘Exactly. I read an article about it in some magazine. The Institute of Contemporary Art. Modern, edgy, out there. And with a water view.’

‘And, no doubt, filled with people wearing black and looking modern, edgy, out there.’

‘So. we can gawk at all the urban boho types.’

‘The way you’re dressed you’ll fit right in.’

‘And you think you won’t?’

‘The way I’m dressed I will look like the most boring—’

‘Then change,’ I said, again my mouth working ahead of my usual cautious thought processes.

‘What?’ he said, staring at me with confusion.

‘Change — that treacherous verb. As in, if you don’t like the way you’re dressed now, change your clothes.’

‘And how will I do that?’

‘How do you think?’

He considered this for a moment. Then:

‘That’s a crazy idea.’

‘But you’re not totally against it, are you?’

He considered this for another moment.

‘Well. “change” does rhyme with “strange”. And strange is. ’

‘Maybe not as strange as you think.’

Five

SYNONYMS FOR ‘RANDOM’: ‘unselected’, ‘irregular’, ‘chance’, ‘by hazard’, ‘happenstantial’.

Happenstantial. As in happenstance. As in, the business of stumbling into something new, unforeseen, unpredictable. Like the happenstantial way I met Richard. And met him again at that movie theater. And agreed to lunch. And the happenstantial way we drifted into the trajectory of this afternoon — which, like all events predicated on randomness, had no foreseen trajectory to it; the fact that we had proceeded from Commonwealth Ave and Newbury Street was predicated on a wholly aleatorical set of circumstances. though aleatorical almost implies chance by design, which perhaps makes it the right synonym to be used to describe all this. Because behind the random lies choice. Which, in turn, means that subtext always lurks behind the happenstantial — except that the subtext is something that only arises courtesy of the pinball-like way an event begets an event, which, in turn, begets the fact that we are now on that exceptionally elegant and luxe stretch of Boston real estate known as Newbury Street, and have just stepped into a boutique (because this is certainly not ‘a shop’) that sells eyeglasses.

‘So do we call this place an opticians, an ophthalmologist, an eyeglass store, or a spectacle emporium?’ I asked.

‘Spectacles — specs — is still, I think, parlance in England. And as we are in New England. ’

‘Well, the place is called Specs.’

‘Don’t think this is the place for me,’ Richard said. ‘I mean, look at the guy behind the counter.’

The fellow he was speaking about had a shaved head and a pair of high-modern pince-nez glasses hugging his nose. He also had large black circular earrings implanted in both earlobes.

‘He looks reasonably friendly,’ I said.

‘For someone who belongs in 1920s Berlin. This guy is going to look at me—’

‘And see a potential customer. Now stop all the fretting and just—’

I opened the door and all but pushed him into the shop. Rather than being all cold and ‘too cool for school’, the fellow behind the counter was charm itself.

‘Now I surmise from the way your wife had to shove you in here,’ he said, ‘you are just a little reluctant to try a change of style.’

Richard did not correct him about the ‘your wife’ comment. Nor did he seem to blanch when the guy accurately read his unease. Instead he said:

‘That’s right. I’m a style-free zone.’

The guy, who had a name-plate on the counter in front of him — ‘Gary: Spectician’ (is there such a word?) — reassured Richard that he was ‘among friends here’. He then proceeded to expertly take charge. Within half an hour — having put Richard at ease — he talked him through various frame styles, quickly discerning that, when it came to wanting a particular look, Richard hadn’t a clue what he really was after. So Gary showed him all sorts of permutations. After talking about how — given his coloring and his oval face — highly geometric frames ‘might be just a tad too severe. and I really don’t think we want the harshness of metal again, now do we?’ he convinced Richard to choose a brownish, slightly oval frame: highly stylish, but simultaneously not a radical statement. Nonetheless, seeing them on him, it was clear that they changed his look. Rather than appearing angular and actuarial Richard now came across as somewhat hip, professorial. Bookish. Thoughtful.

‘You think they work?’ Richard asked, clearly approving of the image reflecting back to him in Gary’s mirror, but also needing my sanction.

‘They’re a great fit,’ I said.

‘As long as your optician in Bath can give me your prescription over the phone, I’ll have them ready for you in about an hour.’

Luck was on our side. The optician in Bath was able to scan Richard’s prescription down to Gary — and we headed back out to Newbury Street.

‘Now let’s find you a leather jacket,’ I said.

‘I feel strange,’ Richard said.

‘Because I’m being bossy?’

‘You’re hardly bossy. But you are persuasive.’

‘But, as a salesman, surely you know the thing about persuasiveness is that you can only persuade someone if they truly want to be persuaded.’

‘And I clearly want to be persuaded?’

‘I’m not going to answer that question.’

‘Four hundred dollars for a pair of glasses. I never thought. ’

‘What?’

‘That I could be so self-indulgent.’

‘Glasses are hardly indulgent.’

‘Designer glasses are.’

‘And let me guess — you had a father who told you that. ’

‘A father and a mother who counted every penny. And, wouldn’t you know it, I married a woman who also thinks that thrift is one of the more profound virtues. And since she is my bookkeeper and sees all my credit card statements. ’

She’s not your mother I suddenly wanted to tell him, simultaneously wondering why so many men turn their wives into mothers, and why so many women seemed more than willing to play that emasculating role. And this thought connected to another one: how Dan himself had, in his ongoing resentful moments, talked to me as if I was the actual disapproving woman who had raised him and who had always let him know he was a disappointment to her. Knowing so well the pain that he had carried with him from childhood, I had always tried to tack away from the criticism that so haunted him. And yet, ever since all went wrong with his career, he’d cast me in that mother role. A role I certainly didn’t want.